Thought it might be better to post this as an independent post rather than on the culture war thread.
“It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas or feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing is further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health. Just as there is a "folie a deux" there is a folie a millions. The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”
I’ve been putting off writing this review, paradoxically because this was a very important book. Erich Fromm, here and in the other two works of his I have read, really captures the problems I have with my life and society, and earnestly attempts to generate solutions, although he himself pessimistically admits that these are unlikely to be implemented.
The central premise of this book, as perhaps hinted at by the title, The Sane Society, is an attempt to illustrate what a society based on real human needs would look like in value. In the process, Fromm defines both what he thinks the fundamental human needs are, the ways in which our society (that of the 1970s in his case) is ill-suited to these needs, and ways that we can get there from here.
Fromm starts the book with a short chapter that makes that radical (in the eyes of some) that our society is actually insane, using suicide and homicide rates in a bunch of western countries over the past hundred years to make the case that something has gone wrong spiritually. You can quibble about the statistics, talk about the arc of history bending towards justice, or point out that materially we have never been better off. All three points may be true, but it’s hard to deny, at least from the point of view of my lying eyes that something has gone wrong spiritually.
The Spiritual Malaise of Modern Capitalism
I think the first time I realized this was when I was a freshman in college. For most of my life up until that point, I had been motivated by whatever the “next step”: doing well in school, so I could take harder classes, and eventually get into the best college (MIT), or in running, so I could run in bigger, faster races, and improve my standing on the team. Although things appeared to be following the same trajectory in the first months of college, progress no longer seemed like it would continue. How could life have any meaning if my material, and hierarchical progress would not continue? When I asked my parents for advice, my mom told me that it was still important to keep working hard, so I could earn money and consume things, but also not feel guilty for not contributing to society. At the time, this answer was completely unsatisfying to me: how could consumption, which is be it’s very definition short-lived, provide long-term meaning? How could “working hard” on something that I didn’t care about, bring me joy or intellectual fulfilment?
I read The Sane Society nearly seven years after that freshman fall and conversation with my mom, and I think the book provides a cogent thesis for both her advice, and my reaction.
Fundamental human needs according to Fromm consist of not only the basic material needs as posited by Marx (food, water, shelter), but also a non-alienated existence with the freedom to influence one’s own environment, self-regard (not treating the self as an object), and the ability to enjoy the fruits of his labor. According to Fromm, both the Soviet and capitalist systems have managed to produce to cover the basic material needs of its citizens, but fail to provide a cure for alienation. Part of this is the feature both systems share in common: industrialism has made modern man alienated from the fruits of his labor. It is much more difficult to be satisfied as an assembly line worker, or even as part of the modern scientific apparatus than it was to be an artisan would made tables from start to finish, or a farmer who grew his crops from seed. Matthew Crawford talks about this topic more in his book Shop Class as Soulcraft, and the diagnosis of both him and Fromm is something that I agree with.
Automation and Alienation
This is why I’m opposed to things like further automation and AI. Labor does not need to become even more alienated. Although I suppose the internet and specialization has already done a lot of the damage, I fear AI may do the same thing for knowledge work that the assembly line has done for craftmanship. No longer will you midwife an idea or a theory from conception to execution, but merely obtain fragments of your thought nearly fully formed from a computer algorithm that has done most of your thinking for you.
Critics may argue that this automation of jobs allows for greater leisure time. Not only has the historically not been the case (see the early industrial revolution), but leisure is an essentially unproductive and consumptive activity that does not lead to spiritual growth or the exercise of man’s will. Leisure activities like training for sport, language learning, or craftsmanship would count as work in Fromm’s system. Although I don’t take as strong of a stance on Fromm against leisure, I can again say from personal experience that there’s only so much relaxation and leisure that I find to be enjoyable before I want to work on something meaningful again.
A Robot Society
The other shared feature of Capitalism and Soviet Communism that Fromm highlights is their conformity. The reason for this in the Soviet system is rather obvious (top-down dictatorship), but in capitalism stems from commodification of the human individual. Both in the labor and “personality” (dating) market, Fromm argues, one must conform to societal standards or risk being labeled as a defective “product” and end up being out of a job or a husband/wife.
I found this argument to be one of the most convincing critiques of capitalism that I had read/heard of. The material critiques of Marx and other 19th century socialists (i.e. that capital was exploitative and would be unable to meet people’s material needs), were proved wrong in the 20th century when the system was incentivized to produce people rich enough to become consumers. However, just paying people more doesn’t change the fact that you are paying them for their labor, meaning they are making themselves into a commodity, a thing, which cannot have anything but bad knock-on effects on the psyche.
So what do we do about all of this? How can I move past both my ideas of progress, and my mom’s consumptive mindset? Fromm basically thinks we can’t, unless we radically overall society. I’m not so sure. Two other books that I will be reviewing soon: the Illusion of Self by James Garfield and Philosophy as a Way of Life by Pierre Hadot provide alternate answers, which I will explore in later posts. But what I will say for now that I do think personal change is possible.
How I will be changing my life as a result of this book:
The Sane Society underlined something that I already knew: the collective norms of our American, western society are neither necessary, sufficient, or even good for human thriving. I’m not sure what the exact right norms are yet, but embracing the Kantian, Stoic, and Christian ethic of loving thy neighbor as thyself, and embodying meaning in work seem like good places to start.
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Notes -
I will say this much - any suggestion for alternate societies that curtails productivity by banning useful tools will not be the one that is ultimately implemented and sustained. I think you can see quite obviously why rolling back the industrial revolution won't happen, and by the same token I claim that any further such "revolutions", be they carried by AI or by other means, will absolutely happen whether we like it or not, and we will adapt to any further alienation as well as we can because we must.
I'm not saying this is desirable, or that we will be happier for it. Very likely neither. I'm saying it's inevitable, in the long run.
I agree. Societies that ban these tools will lose, either on the field of battle or via economic competition (brain drain). I think with AI the case is that the tools aren't very useful/ actually hurt a society's productivity in the medium to long-run.
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Can someone explain what alienation means? I can’t seem to wrap my head around it. It might be one of those “universal human experiences” I am missing.
I really want to not strawman this. There are many sources one could go to, but this sort of 'old work that has been thoroughly commented on' is prime domain for LLMs.1 I asked a well-known LLM about it, specifically asking it to separate the content that was in Marx's writings versus later thinkers' take on the topic, so as to hopefully keep them from being muddled together. It indicated that it thought that there were four central aspects to alienation.
My interpretation is that this is, right off the bat, the most dangerous form from the standpoint of genuine well-being. My interpretation is that one of the problems is that it seems like we could swap in/out the phrase "owned and controlled by the capitalist" and have two independent intellectual constructs with two different implications. It is not clear to me how this ownership/control is essential to the theory, as my understanding of other aspects of Marxism (particularly commodity fetishism) seem to think this concern still applies without this clause.
My understanding is that there is one independent intellectual construct here that is primarily focused on whether you are producing goods for your own use or (possibly to trade) for the use of others. As such, there is more of a sense of, "I need to make this product in such a way as to satisfy the desires of others." In my mind, this is actually a beautiful part of markets, specialization, and trade. One must think about, and care about, others. What they want. What they care about. It is perhaps a double-edged sword, and I think that's what they're getting at. When you're caring about others, you're not necessarily being primarily self-motivated. It is somewhat incidental to the process, but markets/specialization/trade make it more front and center; you're also self-motivated to produce a good product that others will want, because you can then trade it for things that you want. As the old joke goes (at a country scale, but sort of related), there are two ways for the US to produce cars. They could either build their own cars, or they could grow corn, ship it to Japan, and magically ship back cars. There is a possible kind of mind which simply feels a subjective aversion to producing things for others or not producing some of their own things.
I would submit that we should consider how much we should shape society around those particular kinds of minds. How would we do it? It seems to be already allowed for one to not engage in such things. One can already decide to go be a subsistence farmer, living only on the fruit of their direct labor, not producing anything for the purposes of trading with others. Further, if they want to trade, they can already produce the specific types of goods that they prefer, with exactly the characteristics that they desire. Others might not like those products so much. Then what? Do we subsidize it by buying those items with the public purse? What do we do with those items? Do we force others to buy those items? Moreover, if it's not good enough for people to generally have the option to engage in this behavior, I think perhaps people might think that there is a problem if the rest of society is humming along with markets/specialization/trade; it's just somehow some sort of mental block for the people who would prefer to be self-sufficient. What then can be done about this? I'm not sure what the answer is other than to just ban the rest of society from doing these things. Force them to all be self-sufficient, so those particular types of minds won't feel like they're doing something 'weird' and 'different'. Perhaps this could bring some comfort to those types of minds, but I obviously think it must be weighed against the effects that it has on the folks who have different types of minds.
Up to this point, this is distinct from @orthoxerox's description of small business ownership. In small business ownership, you're still ultimately making goods (or services) to meet the desires of others. You are still trying to figure out what they want in significant part.
The second central aspect identified by the LLM is:
This lines up more closely with orthoxerox's description of entrepreneurship. In fact, the first thing that came to my mind is how closely it lines up with, of all things, the IRS's definition of the distinction between "employee" and "independent contractor". As an independent contractor, you're supposed to be able to substantially manage your own schedule and the process for how the work is to be completed. Note, however, that it is definitely distinct from the first aspect. In either entrepreneurship/independent contracting, one must still be thinking about how to make the product something that the customer desires rather than immediately being a thing that one desires oneself. An independent contractor still needs to come to some agreement with the customer as to the general parameters of the finished product. These can be more or less specific, depending on the customer's disposition. Some entrepreneurs joke that they no longer have one boss, they have a thousand bosses (their customers).
I can see the appeal of both of these aspects. There is something nice about doing things in the way that you want to do them, for your own use. Yet again, we must consider whether or not we can influence these balances and what the consequences are. Perhaps we do add challenges to being an entrepreneur/independent contractor that could be reduced. I'd be open to suggestions. I think we try to subsidize at least entrepreneurship to some extent, but not as much independent contracting.
I also think that there was something to Marx's concern, at the time he had that concern, that is a bit less concerning now. It was the rise of the industrial age, and actual factories were suddenly economically dominant. They're not anymore (much to the President's chagrin), and I think the balance is already significantly shifted, naturally. Should we just make it harder for companies to hire 'employees' in some way, possibly encouraging/requiring that they make most of their deals be with 'independent contractors'? Obvious tradeoffs are obvious, and doing things like mandating some sense of, "X% of your 'employment' headcount/budget must be independent contractors" seems like it would be pretty damaging to productivity (but I don't know this for sure), and I'm not entirely sure how much mental benefit it would bring to individual minds.
It would probably render a fair number of business models nonviable, and I guess we'd have to figure out whether the loss of entire domains of goods/services is worth the benefit of some more people becoming independent contractors, as well as what is likely a significant reduction of standard of living that will come from all those former employees having to figure out what else to do and trying to find other gigs. Knock on considerations that are at least worth a sentence include the difference between having to market yourself to a company/companies for an employee-type role versus having to otherwise market your contracting service to whatever sorts of customers you'll want to take on. Some may substantially contract with one company, in a way that is kinda sorta like an employee, whereas others may diversify more. Without getting more into details, I'd say this is kind of a wash, but I could be convinced otherwise.
The third aspect identified by the LLM is:
This one is pretty mind-boggling to me. In what system is labor not at least "required" as a means to survive? I guess UBI? Whether or not labor is "reduced" to a means to survive seems to be entirely a matter of subjective disposition... especially in an era where we're so rich. The vast majority of our labor is not really just for managing to survive; it's to increase our standard of living, to have nicer things in life that we like.
That does still leave a fair amount of it being not an end in itself. But I'm honestly not sure how much of labor can almost ever be an end in itself. One almost always has some other end in mind. E.g., I grow some herbs of my own. I control how I do it (aspect two) and it's for my own consumption, so I'm doing it in a way that produces only what I desire (aspect one), but the end of the labor involved is not the labor, itself. The end is that I want tasty herbs on tasty food, the labor of watering the plants is still a means to that end.
If I had to try to rescue at least part of this, I'd say that it's more related to the second aspect, in the desire for some amount of autonomy, being able to use one's own conscious, creative, and purposeful powers. Modern studies of motivation do, indeed, confirm that many people desire autonomy, alongside things like competence.
One conclusion could be to just reiterate the above discussion of independent contracting, but another would be to observe that our current capitalist system sort of already has a weighing of this factor built-in. Employees prefer jobs with these sorts of things; the research has shown it. It's also shown that this causes them to choose such jobs over others, all else being equal, or even with things like pay being less. Some folks even root sentiments of things like "kids these days don't want to work" with examples being things like picking strawberries or whatever, in the fact that it's harder to recruit employees into lower-autonomy positions when they have options to take higher-autonomy positions. It could have been a historical contingency that low-autonomy work became ever and ever more economically-dominating, but, uh, it didn't? It really seems like, by increasing productivity through specialization/trade/markets, we've opened up new opportunities for people to choose more autonomy.2 I'm really not sure that if we tried engineering society to start with, we could have gotten to this historically-contingent end point.
The final aspect identified by the LLM is:
Again, I find myself thinking that this is quite subjective as a mental disposition, and it's quite contingent depending on the specific community in which you choose to collaborate (one of the ways of choosing could be which employer you work for). Do you see yourself as thinking, "I'm collaborating in (maybe something sounding mundane like) the manufacturing of coffee pots, and together we bring joy to millions of folks who just adore the smell of their fresh coffee every morning"? Or do you think, "I'm just a cog here, and I'm only here to get a paycheck"? Maybe, "I'm collaborating in making sure that this industrial part is up to spec and safe for operation, protecting the lives of others who are using this to, I don't know, run a tractor to grow food, putting dinner on people's plates with their family every night"? I've known people with both dispositions. I've probably had both dispositions at different times with the same job.
I'm likely to be happier at the times when I have the positive disposition. My own sense is that the negative disposition mostly comes up when there's some other thing happening that is pulling me toward a generally negative frame of mind. I think it's unlikely that entrepreneurs/independent contractors are completely free from this sort of disposition ever popping up. I'm really not sure what type of labor could ever be immune. But perhaps that's due to the particularities of my own subjective mental dispositions, and I'm just genuinely missing how other minds experience this.
I don't know that I have the time right now, or the interest, in getting into the LLM's description of later thinkers' gloss on this. I find them sort of less interesting, anyway. In summary, I'd say that there are genuine correlates to human psychology captured by the general picture. I think some components are just wrong, but others are at least relatively close to something not absurd. Again, I think it was a possible historical counterfactual that these aspects could have just continued to get worse and worse, but they, uh, kinda didn't? I'm really not sure how any of them are really inherent to capitalism, per se, rather than being some human psychological factors that are part of the human condition and which interact with a whole set of legal, political, and economic factors that shape any given time/place. They're good to keep in mind when you're thinking, for example, of whether you can shape a job offering in a way that offers more autonomy, because the market has shown that it does, indeed value that. I think the most extreme versions, where we're just like, banning trade or forcing everyone to be subsistence farmers or something, are extreme and extremely harmful. And I'm not really sure how this leads to any serious, concrete proposals that have much of a hope of making things better, given the tradeoffs. I think that the general policy of allowing markets/specialization/trade still leads to significant increases in productivity, standards of living, and the ability of individuals to find the best tradeoffs for where they are on the spectrum of subjective, mental dispositions.
1 - TheMotte's rules on use of LLMs are not currently codified in the sidebar, AFAICT. There may be some explainers buried in the comments somewhere, but I have not saved them. My vague recollection is that basically just raw posting LLM output is poor form, but I think that the type of thing I'll be doing here might be acceptable. My use is for brief summary to try to make sure I'm at least in a reasonable ballpark, as a jumping off point for my own commentary. I also anticipate the LLM-generated content to not be the bulk of the content of my comment.
2 - Or less? I know actual people who say that one thing they really like about their job is how it's repetitive and they don't have to think about it. I sometimes like such things in small doses, but I believe them when they tell me they actually like it all the time. Also coming to mind is Einstein's working at the patent office, saying that it sort of kept him going with relatively repetitive stuff, giving approximately the right amount of 'spare brain time' to be useful. I guess too much, and he might have just procrastinated and found other useless things to soak up the void, but too little, and he wouldn't have had the mental space to think about what he wanted to think about?
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Have you ever made useful things with your own hands? Or ran your own small business?
There's a blog I read that posts interviews with small and medium business owners: how they started out, what their challenges were and are, what their business model looks like. There's a common theme running through all of them: they could all earn more working for hire, but instead they stubbornly cling to their businesses. "It's good to be your own boss, no one will block you from working overtime or skipping vacation" is the typical joke.
My assumption is that they all are especially sensitive to alienation.
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Think about living in a small village community where you're a skilled artisan of some sort. You feel confident in your work which you do autonomously under your own judgment, get pleasure from your mastery of it, and can immediately see how the results of your work benefit yourself and those around you. You're a known and valued member of your community and you have deep and long-lasting personal and professional ties to those around you. Alienation is the opposite of that.
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It's not the case that capitalism is "just paying people more". There's no real mechanism to accomplish that. One cannot simply come up with a deus ex machina to keep everything else the same, but just increase how much you pay people.
Instead, what "paying people more" means is that people increase in productivity, usually via specialization and trade. The trade part is then integral to the means by which people get "paid more". The only real way we know of to increase productivity is specialization and improvement of ideas.
One then must consider the separate question of alienation. In a world of specialization and increasing of ideas, there are many opportunities, some of which are highly specialized, and some of which are the production of ideas. There are now strictly more types of things one can choose to do. I find that alienation seems to be a subjective attitude toward the things that one does. One person may feel alienated from the work of a research scientist; another may feel alienated from the work of a farmer. A thousand years ago, if you were someone who had the subjective experience of feeling alienated from the work of being a farmer, tough luck. Now, you have options. If someone has the subjective experience of feeling alienated from any work other than being a subsistence farmer, living off the land and only their own toil and sweat, they can choose to do so. Most people don't. They feel some stronger alienation that is repelling them from that choice. I don't see why we should force them to experience that greater alienation.
The more general spiritual malaise many feel probably does arise from the abandonment of religion and even half-hearted metaphysics/metaethics. That's pretty orthogonal to questions about wealth, productivity, and what people do for work.
The thing is I don't think people felt alienated from their work in the past. Sure people were bored or unsatisfied, but alienation seems to be a distinctly modern phenomena that comes with specialization. The tough thing which I think Fromm is highlighting is that specialization is also really good for productivity.
Wasn't severe alienation and mental issues a common theme during the industrial revolution; when everyone started working in dangerous factories, in smog filled urban areas? I don't have specific sources to pull up right now, but I vaguely remember this being taught in school.
Yes, I think this began with the Industrial Revolution and the decline of Artisans as a social class.
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How so? Does it still satisfy the following:
Oh I see I misunderstood what you were saying there originally. That is a good point. I would say that the reason that people don't choose that path probably only has a little to do with alienation. Despite the discomfort with alienation, I think the modern people do enjoy distinct material advantages (that they would not have as a subsistence farmer) that make them not want to give up that lifestyle, at least voluntarily. There are however a lot of examples in the 19th century, mainly in Chile and Argentina, of kidnappings of white settlers by native Americans where the kidnapee preferred to stay with the subsistence tribe rather than return to industrial abundance.
My view on why specialization causes alienation is because specialization tends to disconnect you from the product of your labor. A craftsman is going to feel much less alienated than an assembly line worker, even though the later is far more productive, because he gets to see the finished product and feel responsible for it. The same I think is true in knowledge work. A research scientist 50 years ago could do experiments and publish largely independently. But now, at least in my field, papers routinely have over twenty authors: the work no longer really feels like it's yours.
There's gotta be some spiritual way around this phenomena though. One counter example I can bring to mind from the Middle Ages are the stonemasons who worked on cathedrals. They didn't get to see the finished product of their labor, as cathedrals routinely took hundreds of years to build. Nor did they really get to feel responsible for the work that they were doing: there were hundreds if not thousands of people working on these buildings. Yet from what I've read, most of them did not feel very alienated from the work that they were doing. For the glory of God was a very powerful motivator.
I don't think I caught any reasoning for this sentence, and yeah, I don't follow. I'm pretty sure I do feel alienation from the work of a subsistence farmer.
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